Hotel Chocolat comes to Newcastle

Upmarket chocolate specialist Hotel Chocolat is to open a store in Newcastle city centre, it has been revealed – its most northerly standalone shop to date.

As highlighted by Flange at SkyscraperCity, Hotel Chocolat is set to open at 29 Blackett Street, close to Grey’s Monument. That site has been empty since early 2009, when the previous occupant, Ecco shoes, moved out.

The Newcastle store comes at a time of expansion for Hotel Chocolat, following its £3.7m fundraising – through the sale of ‘chocolate bonds’ – earlier this year. Other new stores are set to open this year in Belfast, Guernsey, Jersey, Kingston-upon-Thames and London’s Leadenhall Market, taking the retailer’s UK standalone store count to more than 50.

Hotel Chocolat already has a shop at MetroCentre, opened in 2006, as well as selling via John Lewis stores, but this will be its first standalone high-street store in the region. As yet, there are no Hotel Chocolat stores in Scotland.

With its Grainger Street shop sat in the middle of these new arrivals, one retailer that will need to up its game in the face of Hotel Chocolat is the traditional market leader, Thorntons. Amid own-store sales falling 4.3% in the first quarter of this year, and no chief executive currently in place, Thorntons has struggled to define its market positioning in recent years. This may only get worse if Thorntons’ plans to “localise in-store ranges” comes to fruition, accentuating the divide that already exists between some of its smarter stores, in good locations, and the more dowdy, uninspiring ones.

What Hotel Chocolat gets right – and Thorntons often doesn’t – is that if you are buying quite expensive chocolates you need a little glamour and sense of luxury to go with it. With the former’s like-for-like sales growing at around 15% this year, Britain’s chocolate lovers certainly seem to be voting with their wallets.

[…] in early November, I reported upon the impending of arrival of upmarket chocolatier Hotel Chocolat to Newcastle’s Blackett Street – the retailer’s first standalone high-street store in the North East. The store opened […]

About this blog

Soult's Retail View is a blog by me, Graham Soult, taking a wide-ranging look at the UK retail industry. I'm a retail consultant based in Gateshead - and the person behind CannyInsights.com and CannySites.com - so my posts often (but not always) have a North East flavour. [read more]